Free No Place for Heroes by Laura Restrepo Page A

watched his favorite TV program and she force-fed him spoonfuls of soup, or he tied knots in her hair, or she combed his and he pushed her away? At some point, Mateo became ruthless when it came to delineating his personal space and setting distances. He drew a Maginot Line between them and would not allow her to cross it by even a centimeter. And that’s how it should be. Lorenza understood that, as well as the fact that Mateo was no longer her child, no longer a kid, hers or anyone’s, and she realized how much it upset him when she ignored this truth. Mateo was justified in his territorial claims, it was only natural. But that hardness made tears well in her eyes, tears which she was allergic to.
    “Do you think Ramón has arrived at his house in Buenos Aires,” he asked, “or at that cabin in the snowy mountains—”
    “Or at his bar in La Plata. If you want, you can call him from the public phone. I have the number in my pocket.” He shook his head. Before they realized it, it was past eleven and they found themselves in front of the obelisk, which split in two the red splendor of a giant Coca-Cola billboard and speared upward toward the darkness. How had it become so late? It was something that often happened to them. Although they no longer walked holding hands, their conversation was still as entangling as any embrace and time passed them by unwittingly and the rest of the world remained in the wings. And so they kept on walking, by God’s grace, attimes entertaining each other and at others simply gazing at the ground, and when she thought she recognized Santa Fe, they had returned to the Avenida de Mayo.
    “It’s no use, Mateo, we’re going around in circles.”
    “But you lived here, Lorenza, for years. How can you get lost?”
    “So what? I still get lost in Bogotá. Wait! Do you smell that? That corner smells like Buenos Aires again.”
    They ended up in a dirty and crowded street full of theaters and nightclubs, which they found out was Lavalle. Apprehensively, they made their way past the pale neon lights which failed to make the air warm, sidestepping hands that offered passes for the strip shows.
    “Let’s get out of here, Lorenza. This place is like a frontier. Or look, let’s go into this theater, it looks like a horror film.”
    The movie was terrible, but Mateo didn’t care. When his mother suggested that they leave, he said he wanted to see the ending. She thought her son would do anything, even sit through some vile movie, as long as it stalled the return to their hotel room where at some point he had to make that call which he had no idea how to make.

“R AMÓN MUST THINK I’m weak,” Mateo said. “A weakling without any character. He must think that because he didn’t raise me, I turned out soft. I need to tell him how I smacked a kid named Joe Ferla in the face in Rome. Andwhen I tell him, you confirm it, tell him he has to believe me because it’s the truth.”
    When they lived in Rome, the rector’s secretary from the institute where Mateo studied had called Lorenza one day to tell her that her son had a scontro di una inammissibile aggressività with another student, and the rector needed to see his parents. It sounded unbelievable to Lorenza. Ever since he had been a child, her son had known how to defend himself, but he would never set out to purposefully harm anyone, or to go after anybody with his feet or kicking. The years of unmitigated rage would come later, with adolescence, but as a child he had been peaceful and compliant. The institute was the Esposizione Universale Roma, and during the long metro ride from the city center to see the rector, Lorenza thought about the only other incident in Mateo’s life where he had revealed a violent side. It had happened years before, at the school he had attended in Mexico City.
    “Here it is,” the Mexican teacher had told her, indicating a display laid out on a table, all the drawings that Mateo had done during the